We design efficient competitive algorithms for discovering information hidden
by an adversary. Specifically, consider a game in a given interval graph
G in which the adversary chooses an independent set X in
G. Our goal is to discover this hidden independent set X by
making the fewest queries of the form “Is point p covered by an
interval in X?” Our interest in this problem stems from two
applications: experimental gene discovery with PCR technology and the game of
Battleship (in a 1-dimensional setting). We provide adaptive algorithms for
both the verification scenario (given an independent set, is it X?) and
the discovery scenario (find X without any information). Under some
assumptions on the interval graph, these algorithms use an asymptotically
optimal number of queries in every instance.